


the blood in my veins

by littleblackbow, maggief



Category: Captain America (Comics), Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - X-Men Fusion, Captain America Reverse Big Bang 2018, Inspired by Fanart, M/M, Military, Mutant Powers, Steve and Logan are bros
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-16
Updated: 2018-06-16
Packaged: 2019-05-24 05:21:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14948336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littleblackbow/pseuds/littleblackbow, https://archiveofourown.org/users/maggief/pseuds/maggief
Summary: "The first thing he’s aware of is the cold. He'd thought Hell would be warmer."Mostly canon-compliant up to the end of Civil War, but set as if Steve had crashed into the ice in early 1944, and been rescued fairly soon afterwards. This story follows Steve as he comes out of the ice three weeks after he'd crashed, rather than decades. The Bucky/Steve is in the past as Bucky is canonically "dead" after his fall from the train, but all the spaces where Bucky is missing from Steve's life are evident.Steve teams up with X-Men's Logan and keeps fighting against the German forces that remain. He starts to realise that there's more to his enhanced body than even Dr Erskine had predicted.Rating for military violence, and semi-suicidal thoughts.





	the blood in my veins

**Author's Note:**

  * For [littleblackbow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/littleblackbow/gifts).



* * *

Spring 1944, somewhere in the Arctic

The first thing he’s aware of is the cold. He’d thought Hell would be warmer. He hasn’t been a religious man in many years now, but he also knows that some truths are irrefutable. He’s been destined for Hell since the first time he’d caught a glance of James Buchanan Barnes naked, and no amount of good deeds in war would have ever fixed that. He’d figured he could at least go out doing some good though, that’s what he’d been thinking as he’d crashed the _Valkyrie_ into the icy water. 

Icy water. Icy… But no, that doesn’t make sense. There’s no way, no way he could have survived that crash, not even with his enhanced healing — the extreme cold would have him slipping into a hypothermic coma, regardless of the serum. They’d done a lot of tests on him after he was first given the serum and it’s true that he had run a little hot ever since… They’d put him into an ice-bath and monitored his core temperature, and it had barely dropped even whilst his skin felt like ice. They’d done experiments with both heat and cold in those very first days when he had still felt newborn, fresh into the world. When his hands had felt like artificial appendages attached to him as an afterthought, when he’d kept expecting his breath to catch in his lungs, his throat, but it never did. When his heart had still been jack-rabbiting in his chest like it had used to, as if it too was surprised by this change of circumstances, and it was still learning how to equilibrate, how to pump his blood effectively round his new body.

He had wondered if the fast heartbeat was a symptom of his new body, an augmentation to match his height, his hands, his increased metabolism. Something had settled after a couple of weeks though, after they’d finished all their testing and sent him out on the USO circuit. He’d wondered if he should tell them, if he should mention that something had changed, or just levelled out, if maybe it meant something that he wasn’t the same now as when they’d tested him. In the end, though, he hadn’t wanted it. He wasn’t sure if it was because maybe he didn’t trust them as much as he should have done, or if he’d had enough of their testing. If they knew his body was still changing then maybe they’d never let him out into the world. It was bad enough the closest he was getting to the war was propaganda and publicity, there was no way he was going to jeopardise his chances further.

There had been some things, though, that he’d noticed, some things he wasn’t entirely comfortable with. He thinks about those things as he starts to become more aware of his surroundings. He can feel the metal floor beneath him, his legs jammed at an uncomfortable angle underneath a console. He’s still in the _Valkyrie_ . _He’s still in the Valkyrie._ He’s not dead.

He’d thought, or maybe he’d hoped, that the crash would kill him. After Bucky had fallen, it hadn’t seemed… None of it had seemed… And if he could have ended it, doing something good, turning the tide of the war for good, helping to _finish_ it, then, then it would be been worth it. Steve would have hoped for better for Bucky, but maybe they could have seen each other again in Hell.

He’s so fucking cold.

His head is swimming as he slips in and out of consciousness and part of him hopes that he is dying, after all. Maybe this is his brain’s last gasp, maybe when they say that your life flashes before your eyes they meant the last few moments of your consciousness instead, seared permanently onto your eyeballs tormenting you for an eternity. Hell isn’t a place, it’s reliving your last moments for a hundred thousand years, until the world turns to dust around you.

Steve realises that he’s gaining clarity rather than losing it, that he’s becoming more aware of his surroundings, and then he realises that he’s got it all wrong. He isn’t in Hell now, because he’s been there all along, ever since Bucky fell.

* * *

Steve isn’t sure how long he remains there, is only aware of the icy cold in his veins, the numbness in his fingers and toes. The sound of his own heartbeat is deafening, and he swears it’s beating out of time. _Thrum, thru-thrum, thrum_ . Every few seconds or so, something skips, or misses. After a while he becomes aware of another noise, a faint _schllluur,_ like water sloshing around in a bucket, and at first he think it’s the noise of the blood moving through his veins, forced around his body by the irregular thrum-thrum of his heart. It’s too regular though, and it’s getting louder.

… “Sir! I think I see him, Sir!” …

… “Keep going, men!” …

The voices come to him clearer and clearer. There are people out there, looking for him?

Suddenly the plane cabin is flooded with light as the layer of ice above him is broken apart to reveal bright daylight. Several indistinct figures loom over him, features dark against the light behind them.

He’s not dead.

* * *

They bring him back to New York, and it’s strange - everything is still exactly the same, apart from him. They tell him he’s been in the ice for three weeks, and he can’t understand it. It had felt like minutes, maybe a few hours, but weeks? 

The war is still ongoing, but his action in downing the _Valkyrie_ had definitely started to turn the tide in their favour, and Steve’s efforts previously had all but decimated Hydra. Steve’s glad for that, he is, but he doesn’t dare voice the thought out loud that maybe, maybe he’s not glad to be here too. A part of him had known he wouldn’t survive the crash, had wanted it, had wanted to follow Bucky into death, and now even that’s been taken away from him.

Turns out a lot can change during three weeks, anyway, especially when you’re at war. Anyone who’s anyone is still on the other side of the Atlantic, knee-deep in mud and German artillery. That turns out to be a blessing in disguise though. No one who knows anything about the serum is Stateside, no one who’d originally tested his new body is around to test him again. And Steve knows, _he knows_ , that something’s not right.

He can still feel the cold from the ice, and if he curls his fingers up just so, he can feel the cold building in his cupped palm. He can draw that cold out from inside his bones. It dissipates into nothing more than a cool fog the moment he thinks too hard about it, but he doesn’t have any way to explain it, doesn’t have any frame of reference for why his body’s holding onto the cold. It makes him think of being back in France, when he’d thrown himself on top of a grenade — a real one this time — to protect the rest of the men from the explosion. For days afterwards his palms felt hot, a boiled anger living just beneath his skin, and he’d been too afraid to even touch Bucky, for fear of burning him.

Back in the States, the brass have no clue what to do with Steve, and it’s not even a case of sending him back to his old unit. The Howling Commandos had been handpicked through trial of combat, by himself and by Bucky before that, whilst still in captivity. They’d been compiled as a special task force above normal Army regulations at Steve’s request. As soon as he had been believed dead, the Howlies had been sent back to their respective home units, with no way of recalling them all again at short notice.

He’s on his own again, and back in New York City he feels the loss of Bucky viscerally, like a gaping wound that no one else seems to notice. It’s like his heart has been ripped straight out of him, left a hole straight through, and he doesn’t understand how no one’s commented on it, how no one else can see he isn’t whole, he’s barely even alive.

They trot him out in front of the press, useful for nothing more than good publicity again it seems. No one mentions the dead look in his eyes; maybe they chalk it up to the vestiges of war still ploughing through his memories like a runaway train. He wakes up every night gasping for breath as he relives the moment again and again when Bucky fell. His hands wake up clutching at air, sending cold puffs of fog into the bedsheets. He’s taken to sleeping on the floor with the sheets, but it doesn’t help. The bed though, the bed had been too soft, too easy, and the first night he hadn’t been able to sleep at all. At least on the floor he can pretend for a moment that he’s still out there, that his shield is by his side, that the other Howlies are spread out around him. He can pretend he’s not here, alone, paraded out in front of the press like some prized peacock.

The need to fight itches under his skin, clawing to get out like a caged beast, but no one gives him so much as a second glance. He’s still living in the SSR barracks — there hadn’t seemed any point in keeping the lease on their apartment with both him and Bucky off at war, and he has nowhere else to go. He’d thought about heading to the Barnes residence, but he can’t face Bucky’s mother, can’t face her when it’s his fault Bucky’s dead.

He doesn’t sleep. A week of daily press conferences passes. He reads a careful script of how the war is going, every word like a jagged fragment of ice stuck in his throat.

He feels the ice in his fingertips, and he remembers the cold. He wants to go back, he needs to.

His salvation comes, in the end, not from the US Army or the SSR, but from the Canadians. Someone corners him on the way out of his daily press conference, and his first instinct is to fight, to resist. It takes him a moment to remember he’s not at war, not here, and to become aware of his surroundings again. His would-be attacker is a petite woman in military dress, no taller than five foot in heels, blonde hair neatly scraped back into a bun. The attack is nothing more than a gentle hand on his arm. He wonders how long his instincts will automatically default to fight, wonders if he’s stuck like this forever.

“Captain Rogers.”Her voice is pleasant, soft, but even in those two words Steve can hear that she’s a woman used to giving orders, and Steve places her accent immediately. Much like the US Army, he knows women are not allowed in the Canadian military, apart from in non-combative roles, and so he wonders at the Major insignia on her lapels.

“Ma’am?” He responds politely, one eyebrow quirked up in inquiry. She outranks him, even if they technically belong to different militaries, and he also doesn’t want to let on how close he was to grabbing her in a chokehold.

“Do you have a moment? I’d like to discuss something with you.”

Steve looks over his shoulder, back to where Lieutenant Peterson — his own personal watchdog — is flirting with one of the journalists. Peterson has been shepherding Steve to and from these meetings all week, never letting him get more than a stone’s throw away from him, or talk to anyone unsanctioned — press or otherwise. He figures he’s not in any real danger to follow the Major. If a plane crash into the arctic couldn’t kill him, he doubts Major Five-foot-nothing will be able to, even if she does look like she’s made of steel.

“Lead the way.” And he gestures out before him.

She leads him through a maze of corridors without a moment’s hesitation. The press conference was in the function room of a large hotel, so there’s plenty of places to go if they don’t want to be disturbed, and many places to check before Steve can be found. It will give them a few minutes to talk, at least, and allow Steve to hear whatever it is she wants to say.

The head into what looks like a private meeting room. There's a window along the far wall with the blinds closed, and a dark wood table with six chairs arranged around it taking up most of the floor space. The Major gestures for Steve to sit before following suit.

"I'm Major Olivia Reynolds, I'm with the Intelligence Regiment of the Canadian Army."

Well, that explains how she's a major even though she won't ever have seen direct combat. A spy. Do they want him to spy for the Canadians? It's not like he doesn't have a recognisable face, although he guesses his propaganda won't have travelled across Europe all that much. Still, he's a big blond American, he's not exactly inconspicuous, especially with his nice, shiny shield.

“Officially, I’m not here today, do you understand?”

That catches Steve. The SSR is not technically a part of the US Army. Sure, it’s allied, and subordinated, but because of the amalgamation of both American and UK troops, it falls fully under neither jurisdiction. Steve thinks that maybe if he absconds with the Canadian military he _might_ not get a subsequent court-martial. Maybe. But Major Reynolds has sure as shit got his attention.

“Colonel Phillips and I, we’ve been in contact with the 1st Parachute Regiment. They have a soldier… like you… We want the two of you to join forces, form a strike team.”

Steve’s brow wrinkles into a frown. “A strike team, ma’am? With just the two of us?”

“I have a feeling you won’t be needing any more men.” Reynolds says with a smile, and with that, Steve’s in.

There’s something in her wry smile that reminds him of Peggy. She must know that he’s alive by now, but has made no effort to contact him. He thinks of their brief kiss, thinks that it was for luck more than anything. He knows he made her promises as he crashed, but there was something in her voice that knew he would never accept, that she didn’t want him to.

Briefly, madly, he thinks of kissing Bucky. How they intertwined their bodies locked away in their tiny crummy apartment, safe from the world and all its prying eyes.

He tampers down on those thoughts almost before they’re fully formed. He can’t think of Bucky, not here, not now. He’d thought that kissing Peggy would feel — if not the same — then similar at least, but there’d been nothing. Nothing at all.

Major Reynolds steals Steve out a service door and into a waiting car. He thinks, _am I a fugitive from the US Army?_ He thinks of rescuing Bucky despite direct orders. _It wouldn’t be the first time._

The car takes them out of the city and to a small airstrip upstate, and there a tiny 4-seater Cessna awaits.

“Lieutenant Casey will be your pilot today, Captain Rogers. It’s been a pleasure.”

Steve snaps out a crisp salute, and then Major Reynolds is gone, back into the car, and back to the city, or wherever the hell she came from.

He’s quickly chivvied onto the plane, and the feeling that he’s a fugitive, or some contraband goods being smuggled out of the city only increases. He knows absolutely nothing about where he’s going, or who he’s going to meet, not even the name of the man he’s meant to be teaming up with. He starts to feel the first tendrils of trepidation but shakes them loose quickly. He’d stormed an entire Nazi base with nothing more than his bare hands, if this goes south, he can deal with it.

He almost wants it to go south. He’s been going absolutely insane with nothing to do but give scripted replies to endless questions from the press. He needs to get out, do something, he needs to get outside his own head before he ends up thinking about Bucky again.

The flight is loud and bumpy, but it gets them to another small airfield outside of Toronto in less than a hour. Another nondescript car awaits him there, but this time he’s taken to a real military base, although he’s waved through the check point there without hesitation. He’s glad he was wearing full military dress for the press conference, the higher-ups had thought it added an extra air of competence, or authority. It means he fits in here, even if the American uniform has some differences to its Canadian counterpart.

He’s shuffled into a small interrogation room where a gruff looking man of around thirty awaits him. He’s dressed only in fatigue pants and a white vest, dog tags hanging loosely around his neck. Steve thinks of Bucky’s tags swinging against him as he’d helped him away from that table in Azzano.

The other man is leaning back in a small metal chair, tipping onto the back legs, his hair stuck up into two spikes like horns, mirrored in the long side burns reaching down to frame his jaw. He looks like he could snap Steve’s neck with his bare hands, before the serum at least.

The cadet who’d escorted him in here doesn’t seem inclined to stick around, or even to introduce the two of them, and Steve is left alone in the interrogation room with this man. There’s a wall of mirrored glass, but Steve can tell that there’s currently no one behind it, he knows he’d be able to hear their heartbeats from this distance.

What is interesting is _this_ man’s heartbeat. It’s slow, as slow as Steve’s own, but deep and sure. Had Canada made their own super soldier? Belligerently, Steve drags the other chair in the room towards him and sits down without a word. If no one’s going to tell him what’s going on, he’s not going to beg for information.

The other man spares him a glance and then goes back to picking the dirt from under his nails with some kind of bone whittled-blade. It’s a dull ivory, but sharp looking, and unmistakably bone rather than metal. It’s an odd choice for a weapon, and Steve wonders why they’ve left him unsupervised in this tiny room with an armed hostile. Well, maybe not _hostile,_ but certainly not friendly from the glare he’s giving Steve.

 _Is this some kind of test?_ He’s not going to break first.

It’s as Steve studiously tries to ignore the other man that he realises. The other man _isn’t armed._ Not… not in the traditional sense. He’s not holding the knife, it’s a part of him.

What Steve had originally taken to be a knife held between the man’s fingers is in fact _growing_ out of his knuckles.

Steve’s seen weirder things, he supposes. He should be glad that this man isn’t another Red Skull. He’s wondering exactly what could have gone wrong with the serum to give this man… bone knives for hands, when the door swings open again, revealing a man who could have been Colonel Phillips’ twin. If Phillips had been a foot shorter, and of Asian descent. The bearing though, is exactly the same, and Steve finds his spine stiffening to attention involuntarily. He sees the other man doing the same out of the corner of his eye.

“Ah gentlemen. Glad to see you’re getting acquainted. I’m Major General Pak.”

Silence greets the Major General at this proclamation.

“Steve Rogers, Logan; Logan, Steve Rogers.” Pak gestures between the two of them and Steve reluctantly reaches out a hand. He watches as that bone claw slides back into _Logan’s_ hand (first name? surname?), the skin sealing up seamlessly behind. He really hopes his bones are not about to start doing that. Logan’s grip is hard, and Steve can feel him squeezing more than necessary. Steve has never been one to back down from a challenge though, and he grips back just as hard, trying not the let the effort show through his teeth.

Pak clears his throat gently, and Steve realises he’s been posturing like some sort of caveman.

“Captain, Logan here is currently attached to the 1st Parachute Regiment. You’ll be joining him as part of an elite cohort attached to the regiment. They’ll assist you on missions whenever necessary, but first and foremost, it will be the two of you.”

Steve nods his head at that in acknowledgement. That’s more information than he’d gotten so far.

“Logan, Captain Rogers here will have mission directive. He’s in charge.”

The other man visibly bristles at that, and Steve is reminded sharply of Bucky, how he had always compared Steve to the mangy alley-cat they’d found once, hackles raised and hissing, always looking for a fight. He wonders what else they have in common. And he wishes, god he wishes Bucky were here.

* * *

They get off to a … rocky start. Steve was right, Logan is absolutely not the type to take orders, and more than once he cusses out Pak under his breath. It’s a litany on loop for the whole of their first mission together. The day after their first meeting they were flown immediately back over to Europe and dropped in the countryside south of Rome. 

The regiment they’re joining with are already on the ground, and Steve and Logan are dropping in further south, to move up to a rendezvous point with them. As they reach the drop zone, Steve reaches over to pick up a parachute, grabbing two to offer one to Logan in some sort of truce gesture. He straightens up just in time to watch Logan back up towards the open rear of the plane.

“What are you waiting for, Rogers?” He asks with a grin, before stepping out backwards into nothing but air.

Steve curses, loudly, and drops the two parachutes back onto the aircraft floor. Fuck that. If Logan can jump without a chute, so can he. He runs towards the sky, and dives down after him, streamlining his body into an arrow for maximum speed, almost catching up with Logan before they hit the ground.

Steve has his shield and a pistol strapped to his thigh. Logan has his claws… And Steve still doesn’t know what to make of that. He’d spent most of the plane ride over the Atlantic trying not to stare as those claws shot in … out … in … out of the man’s knuckles, the only noise a faint wet _scchhlerrr_ like a badly tuned radio.

He lands at a run, and sees Logan already several hundred metres ahead. A quick glance at the sun’s position tells him that at least he’s headed in the right direction, and he breaks out into a sprint to catch up.

They fight together… surprisingly well. They’re pushing through three enemy positions that are between them and the majority of the southern European forces, a job that requires both stealth and brute force. They first try a tactic of Logan heading in first, claws in and trying to look as innocuous as possible. The sight of a lone man, muscular as he is, throws them off, leaving Steve to curve in from the side and catch them off guard. The first squad they take down is eight men, and in total it takes them only about three minutes.

Steve is barely out of breath as he flings his shield out one last time, knocking down a German soldier who’d managed to trap both of Logan’s hands in a firm grip, knuckles pointed away, rendering his claws useless. Steve had seen the other man flash him the barest hint of a smile as he’d retrieved his shield for him, swiftly followed by a look of consternation, swallowed back down in less than a second.

“Metal keeps the cold.”

It’s not quite a statement, and Steve can almost see the question bubbling under Logan’s bland expression. He thinks about the cold he can hold in the palm of his hand and tries not to let the guilt show on his face. It’s May, in Italy, he shouldn’t be cold, and neither should his shield.

“Rare metal.” Steve grunts, as he slots the shield back into place, eyes cutting away from Logan’s piercing gaze.

The second squadron is twelve men, but it goes just as smoothly as the first. The only hiccup comes right at the end, when Steve is left tussling with a German as large as he is until Logan comes up behind him and thrusts his claws up through the man’s exposed back. Blood gurgles up out of his mouth, sputtering all over Steve’s face and he has to fight down the absurd urge to lick his lips.

His heart aches as he thinks of Bucky when he had found him strapped to that table. Steve had helped him sit up, and Bucky had done the exact same, coughed for air, or life, or out of shock, and a fine mist of blood had splattered across Steve’s face, covering his lips and brow. He’d been parched, and delirious from actually finding Bucky alive and he hadn’t even thought about it… just licked his lips in reflex. Bucky hadn’t seemed to care, or hadn’t noticed, and Steve had relished that small taste of Bucky blooming across his tongue, mindless of how obscene it was. Merely another sin to add to his list where Bucky Barnes was concerned.

Afterwards they rest for the night in the decimated camp. They sleep in shifts but they both sleep so lightly Steve’s not sure what difference it makes. His dreams are full of blood, the taste like hot metal on his tongue, running out of his mouth and staining his hands red and yet they’re still as cold as ice, like he’s trapped in the arctic still. Maybe this is the nightmare, and he’s still there, hallucinating a whole universe in his death throes, his mind stuck on a loop forever. He jerks awake to the sound of a bird cawing softly, and thinks if he hadn’t grown up in the city, maybe he’d know what kind it was.

He looks over and Logan is staring straight at him, making no effort to disguise his stares, eyes fixated on Steve’s cold and trembling hands.  

* * *

The third position they storm is by far the worst. Word has clearly travelled that a team of Allied forces was taking apart Nazi strongholds and while that is exactly what they want, it doesn’t make their job any easier. They’ve been careless about leaving survivors, although by no means avoiding killing people. Steve has… Well Steve’s reached a limit, and if the idea of military violence didn’t mesh well with the all-singing all-dancing public perception of Captain America, there was no-one here to witness it. Steve doesn’t like killing, he doesn’t _want_ to kill anyone, but when the German forces are hell-bent on sending the world to pieces, and damning everyone with them, then he’s less inclined towards clemency. He and Logan are in no position to accept surrenders, but they haven’t encountered any yet either. Some of the soldiers they’ve encountered so far have been left there, maimed or unconscious but not dead — they want word to get out. However, the majority of the Germans forces are fighting to the death so Steve will give it to them if they ask, morals be damned. It’s what he’d done to Hydra, and he’s having a hard time distinguishing between the two. He can pray for his immortal soul afterwards, if there’s anything left.

And while word of an elite super-soldier task force is travelling to the annexed north of Italy, the Allied forces are staying in the south. Steve and Logan are currently part of a carefully crafted diversion in order to make the Nazi forces think that the fighting is continuing apace within the Italian peninsula. In reality, the Allied forces are shipping out, heading en-masse to Normandy to attack the German front. Steve is aware of the grand scheme, knows that they are a well-placed subterfuge in order to distract the German high-command, in order to shift their attention to Italy and away from forces amassing in England. Once Steve and Logan clear this third position, they’re being transported straight to England to join Operation Neptune, whilst an Allied force stages an attack on Rome, hoping to win it back from German control. 

Steve’s glad they’ve been letting people escape though, as they’re not equipped to deal with prisoners. They’re a two-man team for Christ sake, with no equipment beyond a shield and a set of claws, they don’t have any baggage or comms, they don’t even have a map. Not that they need one. Steve had an unerring ability to memorise the lay of the land from the briefest glimpses of a map of any region. He’d known the whole of Brooklyn like the back of his hand from the age of six, and had used it to his advantage more than once when hiding from his mom, or Bucky’s. It had come in handy when rescuing Bucky, when one look at Hydra’s operations map had been able to inform their military campaign for weeks afterwards once he’d made it back to command HQ.

Where their intel had identified one squadron at the third position, Logan and Steve find three full squadrons, twelve men apiece. They don’t realise their error until they’ve already announced their presence, Steve’s shield flying in from the trees and breaking a man’s neck. They’ve already taken out three sentries without detection, but that still leaves over thirty men against the two of them. Steve is battling hand-to-hand with one of them who manages to get his hands around Steve’s throat. Logan is busy with three of them, while — out of the corner of his eye — Steve can see several of them scrambling for a jeep. It doesn’t matter if they escape, especially not if they’ve been scared in the meantime. They need a few to get back to high command quickly, to attest to the fact that the Allies forces are still concentrating their best men on the move north, that it’s still a priority.

That’s not going to matter to Steve shortly though. The man with his hands around Steve’s neck is, impossibly, twice his size, with an arm-reach longer than Steve’s own — leaving Steve’s fingertips scrabbling ineffectively at the man’s neck, unable to reach round and choke him in turn. Steve knows he’s good without air for several minutes, he’s tested it, but this man isn’t going to lose interest once Steve falls unconscious, and there are still twenty other men to deal with.

He needs to do something. And fast.

His hands are tingling where they reach for the man-bear’s throat and Steve thinks of the ice. He thinks of wondering if he was already dead, the cold seeping through his veins until it seemed like his blood was merely fluid ice in circuit around his body, keeping him cold and never quite alive. He thinks of how he can still feel that cold in the palm of his hands and along his fingertips, and how his shield is always cold to the touch. He thinks of that cold swimming through his veins now, swarming through his body like a crashing storm, and out, out through his out-stretched fingers, twitching up against the man’s throat.

The German’s fingers twitch — almost imperceptibly — where they’re wrapped tightly around his windpipe. Steve thinks of the _Valkyrie,_ of never being warm again. He thinks — incongruously — of his own cold toes tucked in against Bucky’s warm calves, his cold fingers trapped between Bucky’s own. He can feel it as a tangible thing this time, the cold shooting down his arms and out into the man’s throat.

He coughs. His grip slackens infinitesimally.

Steve tries again. Harder this time, colder, sharper.

The soldier’s lips are turning blue. He coughs again, and again, and as a thunderous rattle escapes from the man’s chest, he lets go of Steve, who collapses to the ground, chest heaving as he takes in air again. The soldier is lying on the ground, struggling for breath as well, his lips and brow blue with cold, eyelashes flaked with ice.

Steve thinks, _I did that._ But he doesn’t know how, it doesn’t make any sense.

He doesn’t have time to catch his breath before something _clunks_ down into the dirt beside him. He looks over slowly, mind feeling full of molasses as his body catches up to oxygen again.

Grenade.

_Grenade._

Steve only has time to think _oh fuck_ and look across to his shield, lying on the ground an arm’s length away where he’d dropped it whilst wrestling the bear-man, before the explosion crashes over him.

He lifts an arm up just in time to shield his eyes, but the heat feels like a thousand needles stabbing into him, especially his hands and arms which had been so cold only moments before. He can feel his suit burning off him, melting into his skin underneath. The explosion burns itself out as quickly as it came and Steve is still alive. He hadn’t expected any less, but he’d been hoping it would hurt less. He feels… crisp. He can smell his own skin and hair burning, the sharp ozone taste left behind after a thunderstorm, and a cry of absolute anguish escapes from his burned throat.

The noise draws the attention of several of the soldiers fighting Logan who had perhaps thought the grenade would be enough. Steve’s never been a quitter though, and he’s not about to start now. He thinks of Bucky, after a fight, crouching down next to him checking he’s okay, but never helping Steve up. _Now get up,_ he’d say, _get up._

 _"_ Get up, Rogers!” The shout isn’t coming from his memory, but from ten feet away. Logan is shouting at him, diverting precious attention away from the group of men before him.

Steve rolls over onto his knees, feels the skin stretch inhumanly as the burnt flesh is already started to peel away, leaving baby-fresh skin underneath.

He grunts again and rolls over to reach his shield, using it to prop himself up. Three men have turned their attention towards him now, as if being choked and exploded weren’t enough. Which they actually weren’t, he supposes, and a delirious bark of laugh escapes his mouth. It will never be enough. He’s doomed to be alive forever, living in this hell day after day.

It isn’t fucking fair. He thinks of Bucky, and he thinks of crashing into the ice and the hope of relief. He thinks of the cold, and how it had crept down his fingertips into that man’s throat. He thinks of the grenade, of the fire, of the fire in his blood, running through his veins like every blood cell is one more thing to be angry about, _building building_ **_building_**.

A force like nothing he’s ever experienced bursts out of him like a volcanic eruption. The three men in front of him are knocked off their feet by the force of the blast, and the men fighting Logan stumble, giving him an opening to slice his claws across the throat of the one nearest to him, and then up through the gullet of the other.

Steve stays there on one knee, leaning heavily on his shield. The men lying prone in front of him are smoking, like they too got hit by the force of the grenade. But this, this had come from Steve himself, not from any bullet or bomb.

He’d dropped three men — _killed three men —_ without even lifting a finger.

He looks down at his hands like he doesn’t recognise them. They’re raw pink, and the air around them is shimmering like a heat haze. All trace of his gloves are gone, burnt away to nothing.

It takes him a moment to realise that he and Logan are alone in the clearing now. The remain soldiers seemingly fled at Steve’s display of explosive power. He doesn’t blame them. He looks down at his hands again like they don’t belong to him. What is happening?

Logan’s voice cuts through the slowly smouldering silence, not words of comfort but, “You need to control your mutant powers better.”

Steve’s head rockets up. “Excuse me?” _Mutant powers?_

 _“_ You control your power well, but that explosion wasn’t controlled.” Logan says, and although the words are as terse as ever, Steve would swear there’s something softer in his face, something more understanding.

“My strength is from the serum. I’m an experiment.” There’s a bitterness to Steve’s voice that he tries to tamp down. He’s still kneeling on the ground and for a moment he feels like he’s back at school, swamped by algebra and wishing he were a hundred miles away, wishing he and Bucky were out at Coney Island messing around on the beach, trying to keep their ice cream away from the seagulls.

“Look pal, I’ve been experimented on too, but it doesn’t change the truth. No serum could give you that power.”

Logan turns away from Steve at that, starts rifling through the pockets of the dead and unconscious men around him, looting them for anything interesting or valuable. They leave the site of carnage soon afterwards, Steve having stolen clothes off a dead man and still wobbly on his feet, but recovering with every minute that passes. He feels drained, empty, like a tube of paint squeezed down to its last drop. As night falls, they drop into the cover of some trees and a dell, sheltering them from any passing eyes as they settle in for some rest.

Logan had liberated some rations from the German soldiers and he passes a share of these over to Steve now. Steve marvels at the amount of food Logan seems to pull from nowhere, he thinks about how Bucky used to bring back scraps from the butcher, the off-cuts of ham left over at the end of the day and sold for pittance. How they’d cook it up into a soup, or eggs and potatoes, and pretend they were having an extravagant breakfast with orange juice and coffee that didn’t taste like motor oil.

“You need to eat. Your body will be replenishing its power.”

Steve takes a ration bar of undetermined substance and peel the cheap foil wrapper off, stuffing the whole bar into his mouth to prevent him from having to make a reply.

He needs to ask Logan what the hell he’s talking about. He doesn’t want to ask.

Coming out of the vita-ray had been one of the most terrifying moments of his life. Not in the machine itself really, that had hurt, but Steve has known hurt his entire life — being sick, being beaten by bullies, his mom dying — everything in his life had hurt. And the thing is, he’d thought he’d known what he was signing up for. It might kill him, or it would make him fit, and strong. Healthy. But this? He doesn’t know what this is. Mutant powers?

They’d started to hear rumours in Brooklyn the year or so before they’d left. That there were people out there who were special. Who had power that wasn’t normal — they could run incredibly fast, or camouflage themselves like a chameleon, could move objects with their minds. The stuff of the science fiction novels that Bucky had liked to read. Steve hadn’t believed it, couldn’t believe it. He was a small, skinny, sickly queer boy from Brooklyn. There was enough stacked against him already, without the idea that someone was just born better than him in ways he couldn’t even begin to fathom.

Was he really one of them all along? Or had the serum done this to him? He thinks of Logan’s bone claws and wonders what’s hiding inside his own body.

Steve doesn’t know how to speak first, but he has so many questions. Logan seems to be able to read him like a book though, or takes pity on him.

“I’ve never had any serum like you.”

Steve’s head shoots up quickly. He’d assumed— he’d thought— like him, like the Red Skull, that Logan’s _abilities,_ his body, had come from some variation of Dr Erskine’s formula.

“I was born like this. And it…” Logan seems to be struggling to find the right words, or doesn’t want to. “Cost me. It cost me that I couldn’t control it.”

Logan’s eyes bore into him like they can read his thoughts straight from inside his skull.

“If you don’t learn to control this now, you’re the one who’ll suffer.”

With that Logan turns away from Steve and stretches out alongside the small fire they’ve built to sleep.

Steve’s mind churns over Logan’s words the whole night without sleeping at all. He wonders what he has left to lose, what else can be taken from him. For all that he represents the American Dream, he has very little control over his own life, his own body. He has lost his own freedom in fighting for others’. His body technically belongs to the US government, and he’s a deserter from the US army right now.

He’s lost his mother, the Howlies, Bucky. He still has his health though, or has it for the first time in his life, and he believes in the dream that he’s fighting for, even if he’s distrustful of the brass. Yes, he’d hated being the army’s propaganda monkey, had seen the stark difference between the story in the press and the reality for the men fighting on the front line, how’d they’d heckled and hated him when he was still on the USO tour.

Now, though, he stands for something different. Something more. And he has a future. He still believes in fighting against bullies, still believes this war is the place for him, where he can do some good. And if the war is won, then there’s a future for him out on the other side. He isn’t dead, not yet, surely some good can come of that still?

Logan’s right, he needs to control this. This power, whatever it is, it will destroy him and the people around him if he’s not careful. It’s his now, it seems, for better or worse. Whether the serum awoke something in him that had never been allowed to bloom with how small and sickly his body was, or whether the serum did this itself doesn’t matter. This is Steve’s body now, and he’s going to wrest back control from the government that made him.

Their tests didn’t reveal this, they don’t know about this. His body is his, and now it’s time to claim it.

He takes his resolve straight to Logan in the morning, when the sun has barely risen above the horizon, and a cool dew still lies across the land.

“You were right, I need to learn control. Can you help me?”

They’ve been fighting well together, in-tune and intuitive to the other’s needs, something Steve had only ever experienced with Bucky before. The thought makes him ache, makes him feel like he’s betraying Bucky in some way, but he thinks that maybe Bucky would glad that someone else has his back. This though, it’s the first olive branch of friendship, of trust that goes beyond combat, that Steve is offering out to Logan, and his breath feels tight in his chest as he waits.

“Yeah.” Steve has learn that Logan doesn’t speak much, that’s he’s taciturn and gruff. But that one word is enough.

They’re only half a day out from their rendezvous point just outside Rome, and two days early for it, so they have time for Steve to learn about his new-found skills, to learn some control.

They’re facing off against each other when Logan speaks again. “Do you know what you can do? Heat and cold?”

Steve thinks back to what’s happened since the serum. The grenade yesterday, and the same before back in France. The cold from the arctic.

“Heat and cold for sure, but I have to be exposed beforehand. It’s like I can keep ahold of it. Inside me.”

Logan nods once, and then squares his shoulders, sets his jaw.

“Come on then. Hit me with it.”

Steve stares at Logan incredulously. He’s not just going to…

 _Hit me, Rogers!_ Steve thinks of Bucky trying to teach him how to throw a punch. Bucky had always had his back during a fight, and although he’d despaired about Steve starting them in the first place, he had still been the one to make sure if Steve was fighting, he was fighting as well as possible.  

“You can’t hurt me. Come on!”

So Steve does. He thinks of the fire inside him, thinks of fury and flames. He thinks of it building inside his heart, where Bucky should be, and exploding out into the world.

He sees it this time, it looks like a wave breaking upon the beach except it’s red like fire, orange around the edges. It slams into Logan like a physical force, knocking him off his feet, and setting fire to his clothes, his hair. Steve runs over and helps to extinguish him with his discarded jacket, and his skin underneath the soot is pink and shiny, already healing.

He offers Logan a hand up and pulls him to his feet, staring as his skin visibly repairs itself.

Logan flashes Steve a smile that is at once both a smirk and the heavy acknowledgement that this isn’t the worse he’s ever endured, not by a long shot.

Steve isn’t stupid enough to ask whether it hurts or not. He knows it does, just like with his own body. The hurt though, it’s secondary to whatever job needs to be done. Sometimes the physical pain seems secondary also to the gaping abyss Bucky had left inside him, and he recognises that same look in Logan’s eyes, the look that says he’s suffered, too.

They’re both strong though, stronger than their bodies even would leave one to believe. Steve may have been hoping for the end when he’d crashed the _Valkyrie_ , but now that it hasn’t come, he’s grateful, maybe just.

Steve burns Logan again and again, and a maniacal gleam in the other man’s eyes tells Steve that he’s enjoying it.

It’s mid-afternoon before they call it a day, and Steve is pleased with how far he’s progressed. It takes him only the briefest of moments to call the fire to him now, and he can isolate it to one hand or the other. It burns his own palms on the way out, but he heals almost instantly, and he finds himself liking it. A reminder that he can burn just like everyone else, if he’s not careful.

As for Logan, Steve thinks that he might just have made a friend. Logan blows it off, says that if Steve can fight more effectively, that’s Logan’s back he’s protecting. But Steve’s been around enough stoic military-types to know, they’re brothers-in-arms. A bond has been formed.

* * *

They fight that way for the remaining six months of the war, joining with Operation Neptune to storm the Normandy beaches. 

Steve confirms that he has to have been exposed to the element previously before he can wield it, which is easy enough for fire, but harder for ice. He learns that he can control wind as well, can collect it up like some large, blond windmill. He thinks of the way that Bucky used to run down the small hills in Prospect Park, arms pinwheeling like a mad-man, designed purely to make Steve laugh.

Bucky would laugh to see him now, and Steve tries to hold onto that, remembering Bucky as laughing, not as he fell, that utterly anguished look on his face.

The war is good for Steve, as much as any war can be. It takes him outside his own head, lets him believe that he’s helping, that he can make a difference. He carries on that way for the years afterwards, teaming up with Logan occasionally, but more often than not being left alone. Left alone by the world, and the military. He does his part, he fights when he’s needed, but he never seems to make a connection again until the Avengers come along. Until Tony Stark comes crashing into his life with robots and aliens and stuff Steve could never even dream of, even whilst he knows he can control fire and ice with his own hands.

But it’s fine, he’s fine. He’s papered over the hole in his heart like a badly-remodelled house. At first-glance you wouldn’t even know anything was wrong, and he likes it that way. He’s doing fine, until the Winter Soldier appears, until _Bucky_ appears.

Even after all that, Steve had respected his choice to be frozen again in Wakanda. Though it had almost been more than he could bear, he respected Bucky’s desire to be in control of his body, knew what that felt like. But all the while when Bucky is frozen, all he can think of is cold and ice. He finds himself unable to control fire, can only call ice into his veins, as if Bucky is a physical part of him, and the ice that Bucky is frozen in swims in his veins as well.

* * *

Until one day, he finds fire again, feels that warmth growing in his palms. And he knows what it means, immediately, instinctually. When he gets to Wakanda… Bucky is gone. 

T’Challa is endlessly apologetic, doesn’t know how one man can manage to elude some of the most sophisticated tracking technology in the world. Steve doesn’t blame him though. T’Challa has been a good friend since they exploded into each other’s lives, and Bucky… Bucky had always been a slippery fish when he wanted to be. Normally, it had been helping Steve escape from trouble, but even Steve had never been able to find Bucky when he hadn’t wanted to be found.

The days after he learns that Bucky has left Wakanda without a trace are the hardest. Bucky's presence was always something that slipped in between one heartbeat and the next, imperceptible almost, but cavernous in its absence. And the knowledge that he was alive, that he was out there somewhere, did little to ease the pain when Steve couldn’t confirm it with his own eyes, his own touch.

It gets harder, with each passing year, when there’s still no sign of Bucky, when Steve never hears from him. Steve surrounds himself with what friends he has, but the space Bucky has left in his life is a great black hole that sucks more and more into it with each day Steve has to live without Bucky, until he’s barely living at all.

* * *

Steve is old now, older than he’d ever thought he’d reach in any of the lives he’s lived. Back when he’d been small, young and sickly, he’d thought he’d be lucky to reach thirty. Then he’d received the serum and been thrust into the midst of war, and even that generous estimate had been reduced. Then… He’d been worried that old age would never come, that he’d remain young and strong, never dying. That he’d have to go through eternity watching everyone he knew leave him. 

There had been a time when he’d thought about going back to Logan. They’d been a good team, and he was someone who understood Steve on an instinctual level. He wanted Bucky watching his back if he had to fight though, no one else, no once he knew he was out there somewhere, that he was alive. At least, Steve had hoped that he was, still hopes that he is. That’s the only thing that gets him through somedays, the thought that Bucky’s out there living his life, happy, at peace. He’d asked to be re-frozen in Wakanda because he hadn’t trusted himself, and so Steve hopes that he’s found that trust now, found that hope to carry on living. That he’s chosen to do that living without Steve is a pain almost more than he can bear, sharper than any physical pain he’s endured, even after the serum woke up his body, let him heal faster than they could hurt him.

He’s been in the Iowan countryside for nearly fifty years now. After Nat had died, after he’d buried Sam and Tony. After Bucky had disappeared from Wakanda never to be seen again. He’d been done with the city, done with people always staring at Captain America, watching what he’d become and whispering behind his back.

He’s old. Look at him. All his friends are dead. Who is he without that shield?

They leave him alone out here. He’s just Steve, or Mr Rogers to the polite kids. Probably that crazy old coot to a few others.

His hair’s been grey for decades now. Time moves more slowly for him, but at least it moves. His bones creak like the old wooden floorboards beneath his bare feet as he shuffles through his house. He’d thought he’d be a Brooklyn boy forever, couldn’t have imagined settling down anywhere else. But, in the end, without Bucky there too it had never seemed the same. The furthest he gets most days is to the end of his drive to check his mailbox. It’s antiquated and a bit ridiculous, everything is online nowadays. But some people still send mail to Captain America, and he tries to write back when he can. He thinks it’s like writing to Santa Claus for some kids, you send old-fashioned mail because it feels more special now. His real address is never on there, it’s always just Mr America or Captain America, USA, but the letters find him nonetheless.

It gives him something to do, at least. He’s growing tomatoes, some flowers, so he spends his days outside when the weather’s good. He still has a propensity for terrible coffee, the stronger and bitter the better. He used to joke that the coffee they had in the Army was a metaphor for Bucky’s personality, and now all he has is the coffee.

Some days the walk to the end of his drive can feel further than that first slog out of Azzano, when he’d been fucking terrified that Bucky was about to drop dead under his fingertips. The boots he wears now are old and battered, much like him, his soul, his life — each footstep they’ve taken leaving an echo in the leather, toughening and softening at the same time. The dust kicks up under the steps he takes, and he thinks for a moment that there’s someone waiting by his gateway, hazy through the dust cloud. He shields his eyes from the sun to get a better look as the swirling dirt clears and …

His breath catches in his throat and everything just stops. He stops walking, he stops breathing, even his heart stops beating – just for a moment. Because _Bucky_ is there, in front of him. _Bucky is here_. Impossibly old, just as he is, face worn with lines and hair grey. Steve had thought he’d outlive everyone, but here is Bucky looking just as old as he is, hair grey and face weathered. But none of that matters, Steve barely even notices, because his breath catches in his throat like he has asthma still, and Bucky smiles at him like he can hear the way his heart just stuttered. Steve realises that he probably could.

In that moment Steve is twelve years old again, and Bucky is by his side, dusting off his trousers from a dirty alley floor. Their journey is only just beginning.

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> Firstly this fic would not exist without the amazing [Ranaraeuchle](https://ranaraeuchle.com) who's amazing art I was lucky enough to get for Cap RBB. Although this fic is first and foremost about Steve - and what he's lost and gained - I hope I've done justice to Logan in the meantime.
> 
> Thank you also to the wonderful [Nik](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nik_Fic/pseuds/Nik_Fic) who beta-ed this for me at incredibly short notice. All remaining errors are my own. 
> 
> Come say hi to [me on tumblr](http://iameverywhere.tumblr.com), and I'll see you again for Cap BB!


End file.
